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Month: September 2012

Regular readers of this blog will not need to be reminded that I think Keith Ridgway’s latest novel, Hawthorn & Child, is one of the best books of the year, perhaps of many years – that, in workplace appraisal terms, it stands head and shoulders above its peers. Having spent far too much time on Twitter urging people to read it, I’ve been pleasantly surprised that almostalltheresponsesI’veseenhaveagreedwithme. As I think this is not the first great book Ridgway has written, I jumped at the opportunity to ask him about his work.

How did the novel find its form? When and how did it become clear to you that this set of stories was a book predominantly about Hawthorn and Child? And when that realisation came, did the writing then get easier, or harder? Did it feel like you were heading for a destination, or still feeling your way?

I wanted to write a book of fragments. Many small fragments that would be impossible to put together – like a shattered novel in a bag. I didn’t even think of it as a novel, just a book. There were working titles like 78 Pieces Of Shit, and 54 Demonstrable Fictions. At some point it became 38 Marching Songs. Then just Marching Songs. Eventually it became Hawthorn & Child. In all that reduction there was a failure to do what I’d wanted to do. Fragments kept on fitting together, cohering in a really annoying way, wanting to become stories. So I went from 78 to 8. That’s all loss. But the tension between what I wanted and what I was doing became interesting in itself. H&C is, without being, I hope, too maudlin about it, a book about the failure to write a much better, much more interesting book. At some point I fixed on these two detectives – who came to me originally just as comic ghosts, turning up repeatedly and ineffectively to haunt the scene of some catastrophe or other – and I recognised myself – the writer – in their feeble interventions. And then I realised that I was writing a police novel. Which was a shock. But at least then I could play with that. And the writing became a little easier I suppose, though of course it never really does, you just shift the difficulty slightly. As for a destination – no, I never had one. That much at least I never lost. Or found. Or what have you.

You’ve spoken before about resistance to telling our days and lives as stories, and of our addiction to narrative. Yet most of the stories in Hawthorn & Child have strong narrative drive, so they satisfy this addiction up to a point. Are you lulling the reader into a false sense of security? Do you want them to want to know if Hawthorn is going to be OK?

I don’t know what I want. I suppose I want them to feel something of what I feel – that stories are subjective creations, personal things. That there isn’t really anything like a shared story – or a shared experience – in reality, and that novels for the most part lie about this. The writer of a novel is assumed, and assumes herself, to be an authority on the world of her novel. And I dispute that. Certainty is the enemy of understanding. And I want what I write to be attempts at understanding. So I am filled with uncertainty about everything that seems to happen in anything I write. It’s very difficult to get that on to the page without either inducing a sort of crisis of perception for myself, or worse, boring the reader. So I’m not lulling, there’s no ‘false’. I don’t know what’s going on. I want to know if Hawthorn is going to be OK. But I have no idea whether he will be or not. Or whether I really care. I’m not sure I like him very much. He’s sort of pathetic. But the important thing for me, as the writer of this, is that he feels like he might be a real character, in the sense that he embodies emotions and attitudes and failures and neuroses that we are familiar with. And he’s a creep. A self-pitying creep. Which is what most of us I think fear that we are.

Hawthorn & Child begins and ends with chapters that foreground the relationship between the two detectives (I’ve heard a couple of people compare them to Bill James’ police procedurals). I could have read a whole book just of the dialogue between Hawthorn and Child. Do you read crime fiction? Do you ‘prepare’ characters by writing more about them and then cutting away? How well do you feel you know them, and the other characters in the book?

I do read crime fiction. Usually in binges. I enjoy crime fiction a great deal. Or two thirds of it. By which I mean the first two thirds of each book. The last third of a crime book usually pisses me off. I love the exposition, getting everything set up and into position, and then the cranking out of the mechanics that are going to get the thing to dance. But in the last third it seems to always end up in a sort of badly choreographed dogfight and the pacing goes haywire and there’s so much chasing after loose ends that it ceases to have anything to do with our experienced world and becomes more a sort of fantasy of resolution, a kind of neurotic tidying of life’s mess, like sport.

I don’t ‘prepare’ characters, but I do write much more than you’ll read. I cut a lot. But this happens when I’m just trying to write. I don’t really do preparation in the sense I think you mean. I might make some notes – but just very general things. Child wears glasses. Hawthorn’s brother is a taxi driver. That sort of thing. As for how well I know them – I don’t really know them at all. Or, no better than someone who’s read the book a few times perhaps. I’m not holding back information – other than locations maybe. I know where Cath goes to school. I know where the shooting in ‘1934’ happens. I know roughly where Mishazzo’s office is. But anyone reading the book can imagine those things for themselves. I have ideas about some of the characters that aren’t in the book. But so will any reader. I don’t know anything.

Your first two publications, Horses and The Long Falling, are more traditional narratives than the later novels. Since then the structures have become bolder and there’s a greater presence of the uncanny. What do you attribute this to? Were you shaking off influences or Irish traditions with your early work?

This is an example of story telling isn’t it? I’ve no real idea what I was doing in those books. I’d only be guessing. But Horses is very much a bit of traditional Irish rural gothic with the stock characters and the silly plot, and I think it’s a piss-take. I remember writing it, and I remember that I wrote it very quickly, and that I really enjoyed it. And I’ve never written anything as quickly since, nor enjoyed writing anything as much since. I haven’t looked at it in ages though and don’t feel responsible for it.

The Long Falling is different. It was written before Horses, and it seems terribly earnest to me now, but I have a sort of love for it. I was a different person when I wrote it – young and quite unworldly – and it seems to me at this distance that it was a brave novel for me to write. I like that it was my first book and yet I made these choices : it is largely told from the perspective of a middle aged woman; the character closest to myself – young, gay – turns out to be a bastard; it has lots of gay sex; it speaks very directly about the X Case, and it’s angry about that; and it foreshadows, to some extent, the suspension of kindness that came with the boom years. I wanted to write a book about all of that. And I wrote it in the way I found that I could – conventionally, without much thought about narrative or structure. But again, it was written by someone else, and I admire him – naive little creature – but I can’t really see the connection to me.

The way my writing has changed over the years comes down I think to dissatisfaction with what I’ve done before. I felt after The Long Falling that it wasn’t true. Which is a dumb thing to say about fiction. But I felt that it was faked. Forced. Contrived. The next novel I wrote –The Parts– was an attempt at not-faking. It is almost entirely fake. It’s a terrible book. And it so shocked me that I had written it that I completely stopped what I was doing and tried to start again. And Animals feels to me now like my proper first novel. I began to use what Bolaño talks about – memory and ethics. I stopped trying to write novels and just wrote, and wrote out of myself, relying on my own experience and perception, and shaping something that I feel is true.

Hawthorn & Child is a composite novel in stories; Animals began as a short story. Do you find the short form more satisfying than a long single narrative? What effect, if any, did publication in The New Yorker – the holy grail to many practitioners – have on you as a writer of stories?

As I said above – I try to just write. And what I’m writing tries to find its own length. I don’t find any form satisfying – or no more or less satisfying than any other. And I think the distinctions between various forms – the short story, the novella, the novel – are being blurred, particularly with the emergence of digital media, and I think that’s a really interesting thing for writers, and is something we should welcome and enjoy. I write things sometimes that are too short for publication. Or which, if I put them aside to collect, wouldn’t reach a reader in years. And so I put them on my website. And I love that. That I can wake up in the morning and write something I like but which is finished almost as soon as it’s started, and I put it on the website and by afternoon it has its readers. It’s the most satisfying form of publishing in a way. And no money changes hands. There was a piece that was originally in H&C called The Spectacular, which was too long for The New Yorker or The Paris Review or places like that, but not long enough to put out in book form on its own. And I persuaded Granta to put it out as a digital only thing. For 99p. Like a single that precedes an album. And that seemed to work very well. So different ways of doing things are opening up, and I think, I hope, that will change the way writers write.

The New Yorker pay well, and I got to work with a really wonderful editor there called Cressida Leyshon. So that was great. But I don’t really get that Holy Grail thing. Cressida’s editing on that one section of H&C I think had a ripple effect on the rest of it. Nothing structural, just at sentence level, word level. I went through the whole book again having borrowed her eye as it were, and just tightened everything up a notch. As to what effect that’s had since – you learn from a good editor. You can hold on to their perspective to some extent and return to it.

A sense of place is strong in your work, either named (Dublin in The Parts, London in H&C) or unnamed (in Animals). Is setting important to you? You wrote about London when living there for ten years; now you’re back in Ireland. Where will your fiction go next?

I react to what I’m surrounded by. Maybe I don’t have a very good imagination. But I think of both Animals and H&C as London novels, though yes, it’s not named in Animals. I’m back in Dublin now. So that will bubble up, I have no doubt. Though before I moved back here I had planned a novel set largely in Ireland anyway – though not much in Dublin. And that’s still the plan. But my writing is for the most part about filtering my own experiences and perceptions through whatever set of assumptions I’m currently making about human beings and the state of the world, so it’s what’s to hand that I use.

I’m not sure I can elaborate. Literature is all failure. And is therefore without limit. He is so good that he comes close to success. On his terms of course, and for readers to whom those terms make sense, seem right, ring true. Maybe I mean that he came close to putting a stop to my literature. I read Cosmos first, after I’d written Animals. And I just thought – Oh. So that’s what I was trying to do. It is unnerving to read books that feel better than my best possible hopes for my own books. He seems to have been in my head. And he seems to have looted all the good stuff. And he seems to have written it all down – before I was even born – with the sort of direct, honest, fiendishly wicked, clarified insanity and utterly cold conviction of an Old Testament prophet. And he’s hilarious. And he was sexy, and intricately intelligent and well read and cunning. And he led an interesting life. I hate him really.

I don’t remember saying that I’d gone off Beckett, though it sounds like the stupid sort of thing I would say. Someone who goes off Beckett goes off. I love Beckett. Though it does annoy me a little when people (I think I mean reviewers) latch on to that and talk about my writing in the light of it. And it’s invariably people who have an idea of Beckett that is superficial and inaccurate. The Beckett stereotype. I’m not that interested in the plays. It’s the fiction that I love, though it’s been a few years since I’ve read any of it. But it’s the warmth and the funnies and the subversion that I love. And I love the man, if that’s not creepy. He was a wonderful person, by all accounts. That’s really rare in writers. There is a tiny snippet of film on YouTube of him talking. And you get the south Dublin accent that some people in my family have, and it’s very clear, and you get a real sense of kindness from him, and honesty, integrity, even in just a few seconds, talking about a play somewhere. And I find it genuinely, peculiarly, moving.

Can you recommend an overlooked book or author to readers of this blog?

Zadie Smith’s new novel NW was – mathematically – one of the longest awaited of the year, and its mixed reception surprised me. For every 850 words of closely-argued praise, there was a crowd of cavils by a normally perceptive critic. I had expected critical near-unanimity on this one, with the only disagreement being which section was best. Anyway the attention paid to the book affirmed that any new work by Zadie Smith is a publishing event, and this time, in my view, a literary event too. I was grateful for the opportunity to ask the author some questions about NW and her writing.

(You can buy any of the books mentioned by Zadie Smith from the excellent independent bookshop Bookseller Crow by clicking on the images below.)

NW is a novel in varied parts, about the lives of very different people in one area of London. Did you always know that their stories would be part of something larger? How did the novel find its form?

I didn’t begin with any stories, really. Just this single idea of a girl coming to the door. The novel found its form slowly, over a long period. I wrote the first lines almost nine years ago. And that’s really how it was built: sentence by sentence, hoping the shape would emerge by itself. But once I had the idea of the girl coming to the door, I started to read around the idea of guests and hosts… and there’s sort of a long philosophical history to those ideas, and inevitably they ended up being a part of the book, and shaping it. And from “Who gets invited?” I went to “Once you’re invited, what kind of hospitality is ideal?” – and that gets you into thinking about utopia and dystopia… And those ideas ended up being another room in the house of the book. It’s hard for me to explain, but I guess as a general rule I find the characters subconsciously, but then the conscious part of a novel are these larger ideas. The whole trick for me is not to let the ideas overwhelm that subconscious work, which is where I feel the real life of the thing is. But perhaps for 90 percent of readers all the larger framework goes unnoticed and all they see is a lot of uncouth Kilburn people, talking… I can never tell. It doesn’t really matter. I think that’s just the risk you take when you shape a novel round the present. People distrust the present – it looks formless, unserious. They want the security of the past, and of familiar forms.

Much of the strength of the book lies in the way it reports communication between characters, particularly those of different social and cultural backgrounds. Is NW a state-of-England (or part of it) novel?

I find that idea really boring: ‘state of the nation’. It’s one of those phrases that people who secretly dislike fiction use to pretend a novel is just a spring board to enter into some other, less embarrassing discussion: a political analysis or a sociological portrait. I really don’t presume to know the state of England. I’m a fiction writer. I’m interested in trying to find ways to depict experience through a medium that can never succeed in depicting experience fully: language. It’s a fool’s task, but I know that the pleasure I have as a reader is watching different writers attempt it. And this is just my attempt, to add to all the attempts by others that have come before it. Of course some of that experience involves ‘having been born and bred in England,’ but a sense of place is just one part of a larger concern, as it is with all novelists, no matter where they were born. How does language feel to hear and use? How does time feel? How can we know other people are real and not just projections of our own desires or fears? What does the thought of death do to us? These are the sort of vulgar, childlike question that novelists ask – at least, the kind of novelists I’m interested in. Because it’s just so odd to be alive! And fiction is about that. I think all good novels are about “the state of being alive.” Trying to make them act as national sociological descriptors isn’t the worst crime in the world, but focusing on that aspect ignores the very particular linguistic thingyness of the form. To me writing is deeply irrational, idiosyncratic, because its medium – language – has so much ambiguity built into it. That argument that Alice and Humpty Dumpty have about the instability of meaning that’s the epigraph of a million graduate dissertations… Language is the absurd bit of writing that can’t be entirely suppressed or controlled by journalistic ideas like ‘state of the nation’ novels. Maybe the phrase, if it’s used at all, is best used satirically, as Amis used it.

Sometimes it feels that in England and America especially there is this desire that the novel behave itself and exist as only a sort of mildly creative interpretation of the news. Faction. Solid, recognizable, like a TV sitcom written down. But a novel should have a little witchcraft in it, don’t you think? It should be a little weird. It should try to do something that can only be done in this form, in language.

When reading NW, I thought of other books. London Fields (obviously), which is similarly controlled in its prose yet enacts the messiness of life even as it portrays it. Or Evan S Connell’s Mrs Bridge, which like the ‘Host’ section in NW, makes up a whole life in short discrete scenes. Does the book have any direct literary inspirations or influences?

Hmmm… When I think of London Fields I think of White Teeth. And there the influence is direct. But nothing could have been further from my mind writing NW than London Fields… I see books in terms of their sentences and to me the sentences of White Teeth and NW are really from different planets! But this may be my own delusion. In the end, you have to defer to readers: you can’t instruct them to see a sentence your way – they have to see it themselves.

Anyway, Mrs Bridge was certainly in there, though perhaps not as much as Roland Barthes’ autobiography, Raymond Queneau’s variations, and various books of epigraphs I was reading. I became envious of that numbered structure – and then it seemed to suit Natalie so perfectly, with her determination to march boldly into the future. Originally her section was in a sort of fractured first person. Everyone who read it hated it – me included. Then another writer said to me: “You’re the only writer I know who can create no sympathy in the first person.” I thought: that’s right! When I write the pronoun “I”, I think of myself and end up being incredibly cruel. I’m not sympathetic to myself, as it turns out. I need the she and he.

NW is on the one hand psychologically acute and strongly character-driven, but also experiments with form and content – it’s littered with up-to-date cultural references, has typographical trickery and surprising appearances of the way we live now (such as a chapter made of Google Maps directions). Do these elements come easily? Or is “the culture doing strange things to novels“?

Oh, not so strange. You could find far, far stranger in 1918 or 1761. Nothing new under the sun. The novel has always been a weird form, full of oddities. If there’s trickery in this one, I’m sorry for it: I genuinely wanted to try and get closer to reality, not to obscure it. I mean, look: a version of the most realistic novel possible right now would be the one that took into account the fact that for much of each day in the west, the consciousness of many of us is projected outwards into a 14-inch lit screen, and any thought we have constantly penetrated by news, trivia, gossip, adverts, glimpses of content, and email, always email. I can’t figure out a way to do that, but some younger writer will. Not in the dull manner of ‘putting emails in a novel’ but some organic and genuine way of representing that reality. And stuff like that will always be called ‘trickery’ and accused of shallowness and then fifty years later it will be understood as pure realism. I remember David Foster Wallace saying somewhere that his ‘real’ life did not involve walking by a stream, pausing under an apple tree and having a deep internal monologue about the nature of the world – yet that’s what his fiction teacher expected of him and it’s true to this day that much contemporary fiction hangs upon what are actually quite unrealistic premises. But people still call it realism and think of it as completely ‘natural,’ not strange at all. To me it’s a little strange.

The same goes – at the most banal level – for content. When I first started writing, people often asked why I insisted on this ‘multicultural’ cast. To them it was a publishing ‘angle’ or some kind of post-modern trick. Slowly you realize: these people live in an entirely white social world. So to them it probably is exotic, it is an angle. I had interviewers – especially abroad – congratulating me on the “trendiness” of my family, as if I had picked out a black mother and a white father for fashion purposes. But to me what’s exotic is a world in which everyone is white. I’ve never lived in that world. Being mixed race is not some kind of gimmick: a third of the kids in my school had families like that, and nothing could have been more dull to all of us, more everyday. I remember, too, the shock of reading reviews that took it for granted that Willesden is a sort of piteous place to live, unutterably ‘grim.’ And if a character of mine isn’t living in a four storey house in Hampstead their lives are also described as ‘grim,’ or brutally modern, or whatever. It makes you wonder: where do these reviewers come from? This is just bog standard London life I’m describing, the lives of millions. But perhaps the only ‘moral’ of my fiction is that one person’s strange is another person’s normal.

Your essay ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ attracted much attention, contrasting lyrical realism (in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland) with the ‘alternative road’ of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Where do you place your own work in this context?

I don’t really. The critic in me and the writer in me are two different people. The critic writes of what she would ideally like to read; the writer only writes what she can. Criticism is easy; fiction hard. I know what I’m doing when I write an essay. I have no idea what I’m doing when I write a novel. Fiction is a much riskier enterprise.

And then that essay is a polemic, and describes what I felt, at the time, to be an extreme situation in publishing. I think China Miéville – my Kilburn neighbour! – said recently that English fiction tends to privilege recognition over strangeness and alienation, and I think that has often been true. Personally I adore the recognition Jane Austen provides but I also love the strangeness of B.S. Johnson or Octavia Butler. In “healthy” times there’s no need for the polemic: it’s a wide church and both types of writers can exist perfectly happily in there. But it didn’t seem to me to be a very healthy time. I think it’s got a little better, at least from the books that I’m being sent. And the ideal – as I think I said in the essay – are those books that defy all categorization, that are great on their own idiosyncratic terms. I was describing two particular paths in the tradition of the novel, but what marks the most interesting novels is their absolute particularity. You can’t pin them down so easily. What kind of a novel is Invisible Cities? What kind of novel is [Naipaul’s] Half a Life? I’m afraid real writing laughs in the face of polemical essays. They were rare four hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, fifty years ago, yesterday – great books will always be rare. Lolita doesn’t come around every day. Heart of Darkness doesn’t come around every day. Most novels are just “good enough”, and given that this is so, shouldn’t they be welcomed in their full variety? Great writing comes in a trickle, not a flood. And we’re not so drowning in riches that we can afford to dam up certain tributaries.

As for my own writing, I’m surprised to find I’m quite excited about the future, which I’ve never really been before. NW feels like my first novel in some ways, maybe because it’s the first I’ve written as what my mother would call “a grown ass woman.” So I’m just going to keep on shuffling down my own path, wherever it leads me. The next novel I have in mind is actually a sort of speculative fiction, set in the future, so I don’t know where that lies along those two paths. I don’t think I care!

As a reader, I’ve discovered that since becoming a parent, limited reading time means I’m much less forgiving of – or willing to continue with – mediocre books. Does parenthood have any comparable effect on writing? Are the short sections of NW an effect of this?

Sure. But that makes it sound purely practical. To me, the intense awareness of time that parenthood creates makes a different person of you, and necessarily a different writer. I hate waste of all kinds now. I hate padding. I want only essential things. A good analogy is party-going. I love to drink and I love to dance. I didn’t used to need an excuse to do those things. But now it better be the best party that man has ever invented, otherwise I ain’t going. Otherwise I’m not paying the babysitter, enduring the tears, texting to check the child hasn’t died, and so on and so forth. The same logic works on the page. If I’m going to write it, it better be a necessary word. It better be essential. Because otherwise I could be hanging out with my family, which most days is about infinity times more enjoyable than struggling over a paragraph in the library.

Parenthood is also a central subject in NW. Is this something that came from the essence of the characters Leah and Natalie, or from a desire to write about something prominent in your own life?

I began the book five years before I had a child. That seems to be a pattern with me. On Beauty is about a marriage of thirty years standing, but at the time I had been married only two. I don’t know the reasons. You’d have to ask a psychiatrist.

Can you recommend an overlooked book or author for readers of this blog?

I don’t know if it’s overlooked, but someone just recommended it to me and I’m enjoying it. It’s got a great title, too: How to make love to a negro without getting tired by Dany Laferrière.

In approaching this book, I’ve been wondering how to avoid reading it – and writing about it – as Zadie Smith’s first novel in seven years, when it is, undeniably, her first novel in seven years. Such a formulation creates expectations of something massive, epic, exhaustively life-encompassing. Most of all it sustains the illusion that the author really was working on the book for all of the intervening period. This does happen, but rarely. Yet we know that Smith, after On Beauty (2005), had many other things to occupy her, not least becoming a parent. She has, perhaps to dampen expectations, called her new novel a “very, very small book.”

NW is a small book – in page count, Smith’s shortest novel yet. There is not a scrap of fat on it. But it unfolds, like an origami water lily, and contains multitudes. Indeed it is by making it such a small book – set in a few square miles of north-west London – and making us so intimate with her few characters, that Smith has created such a rich experience for the reader. After Hawthorn & Child, it feels like the second great London novel of the year (and yes, I did try Lanchester’s Capital). It feels, in fact, like a refinement of White Teeth and a focusing of that novel’s messy but charming potential, speaking of the encounters and fields of exchange that take place in a world city: even in part of it.

These encounters are across social and racial boundaries, and show how people who share the same streets, and labour under the same governments, engage, or fail to. There are three main sections to the book, though the characters sometimes cross into one another’s pages, to emphasise the point. Leah Hanwell anchors each end of the book. At the beginning (‘Visitation’), she has just discovered that she is pregnant, when she answers the door to a young woman, Shar, who needs to borrow money urgently. Shar is garrulous, gabby, half-charming; Leah is more distant, at a disadvantage. Shar lives in the nearby Garvey House council block, where Leah grew up (“From there to here, a journey longer than it looks”). The friction of their exchange sets up a charge that runs through the book.

Leah lives with her husband Michel, from whom she has secrets, and their dog Olive (“ridiculous, adored”). Leah’s character is cool, perhaps cold, and it is a notable achievement to convey this in prose as likeable and slinky as Smith’s. Her ease of style and lightness of touch are there on every page, and she is very good on the internal uncertainties which paralyse us all yet drive our actions. She uses a scattering of textual styles and surprising inclusions – a chapter in Google Maps directions, a cacophony of workplace voices running down the page, one character’s internal monologue proclaiming ‘EPIC FAIL’ – which reflect the wild diversity and modernity even of this one corner of the city. Crucially, she writes fluently about race: her characters have various ethnicities, but it is through others’ awareness of their racial and cultural differences that abrasions and illuminations occur. Leah’s mother, castigating her for lending Shar the money (“robbed on your own doorstep by a Gypsy”), places her trust in Michel. “You can’t con his people so easy.” (“All of them are Nigerian, all of them, even if they are French, or Algerian, they are Nigerian, the whole of Africa being, for Pauline, essentially Nigeria…”) Leah’s colleagues offer a passive-aggressive word of advice:

no offence, but for the women in our community, in the Afro-Caribbean community, no offence, but when we see one of our lot with someone like you it’s a real issue. It’s just a real issue you should be aware of. No offence.

The pleasure is that these brief phrases pack so much in, not only about those speaking – you can hear the very voice and tone in that last excerpt – but about their relationship to Leah, and touch too the book’s wider themes. Leah herself is a fascinating character, resisting change (“why must love ‘move forward’? What way is forward?”) and seeing increasing disparity between her life and that of her oldest friend, Natalie, now a lawyer and a parent. “Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.”

The risk for an author in a composite novel like this is of frustrating the reader when cutting away from an interesting character. Here – and again comparison with Hawthorn & Child is inevitable – Smith achieved the rare feat of taking me out of a story I was enjoying, and making me enjoy the next one even more. In the second part, ‘Guest’, the book moves up a gear in its depiction of how people engage across divides. Felix Cooper is 32 years old and a charming man – no mean trick to make a former drug dealer the most likeable person in a book – and his story is the most perfect self-contained part of NW. He is an urban creature, who “had been to Wiltshire once and returned astounded.” He has a series of encounters on his way to meet his sometime girlfriend, and former customer, Annie. He meets his feckless father Lloyd (one of the few family connections Felix has left: brother in prison, mum gone), an elderly neighbour Phil Barnes, and Tom Mercer, a posh young man selling a car. The awkwardness of Tom’s inept negotiations with Felix – an unease which goes beyond the generic discomfort of a middle-class householder struggling to make conversation with the tradesman – is a comic highlight of the book. Much more brittle is his meeting with Annie, a privileged but damaged young woman, one of those who “could fall and fall and fall and still never quite hit the ground.”

Smith breaks the story again, and takes a bigger risk, in the third section, ‘Host’, which occupies most of the second half the book. This gives us a scattered history of Leah’s friend Natalie – born Keisha – told in short, numbered sections, like Evan S. Connell’s Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge. Natalie, even while she is still a child, while she is still Keisha, fears that she has no identity of her own (“You are making it up as you go along,” she chides herself): so she creates one. The story of Natalie and Leah is of drive and no drive: or of Drive and Neutral. The representation of Natalie’s adolescent and post-adolescent angst is just so: “she struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experienced the profound isolation and loneliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world.” A finely judged teenage pretension also slips into the numbered sections themselves, and their titles too, which if read straight might seem to run close to affectation. It is into this part of the book that parenthood (“her whole life had essentially become work”) comes in full flood; parenthood, and the absence of it, running through the novel.

It filled her with panic and rage to see her spoilt children sat upon the floor, flicking through past images, moving images, of themselves, on their father’s phone, an experience of self-awareness literally unknown in the history of human existence – outside dream and miracle – until very recently. Until just before now.

It may be this part that Smith refers to in this interview, where she says that she rewrote the last third of the book after her husband, Nick Laird, told her it had gone “very wrong”. There remains a strangeness to it, an ill-fitting quality. This may be a function of the staccato telling: screengrabs of a life which don’t create an illusion of wholeness as Connell’s Bridge books do. It may be of the sadness which begins to overwhelm the book in the second half, and sits oddly with Smith’s always sparky prose. Yet the more I thought about this section, the more I felt that these were ‘problems’ that, more than anything, demand another reading to get to grips with. (Increasingly, I am of the view that I should read a book twice before committing any thoughts to writing at all.) New things are, by definition, strange, and NW feels new all the way through. It’s almost in the title. The book is full of how we live now, but it has a traditional feel for people, and for language across generations and social classes: like a third way between Smith’s two directions for the novel. It also feels like a breakthrough for Smith, in a sense her first mature work. Her previous novels were written before the age of 30, and ultimately fell down to a greater or lesser extent: books I enjoyed, but wouldn’t reread. Not so NW, a novel altogether tighter and trickier to unlock. My feelings about it are similar to those for Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room: quibbles while reading, once I began thinking and writing about it, began first to dissolve and then to transform into praiseworthy qualities. Not incidentally, I was softened up a little by finding an author at the top of her game who shares so many of my cultural references: a late-thirties thing, I suppose. How many novels, after all, contain a chapter titled Spectrum 128k?